Metacrisis and 'Mission Impossible'

The self-critical subtext of The Final Reckoning

Right from the start, this ‘final’ Mission Impossible film takes itself seriously as a culmination of the franchise. It begins with a summary montage of scenes from the earlier films, which also show up as backstory at pivotal points, creating a ‘sense of an ending’ that draws on a highly self-critical subtext, or so I’ll suggest.

A BBC film critic calls it the doomiest and gloomiest instalment of the franchise, and the apocalyptic mood is not just the consequence of needing to up the stakes at each step of the series; it’s a mood fit for a grand finale, an attempt to go out with a bang - at a time when fiction struggles to compete with reality on ‘impossible’ challenges like climate change, nuclear war and AI.

Let’s be clear, I’m not denying that the surface plot has many elements that are wildly silly (Guardian), and inherently absurd (The Independent).

Though, even at this level, however much the facts around existential risks from AI are distorted to fit the conventions of the genre, there’s a laudable implication that such risks are worth taking seriously.

As if taking the lead from 2023’s Barbenheimer phenomenon, it’s a metamodern achievement that despite this apparently serious political messaging, it still pulls off the high entertainment we expect from the franchise.

But behind the thrills and spills of Tom Cruise’s trademark set pieces lies a seductive fantasy: that of the pure moral agent who is uniquely capable of effecting a massive positive impact - in this case preventing nuclear Armageddon - through clearly specified actions.

This fantasy can be fairly criticised for neglecting the massive complexities of real-world risks, and tending to a kind of messianic hero-worship.

Writing for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey observes parallels to the idea of Butlerian Jihad - the war against thinking machines - described in Frank Herbert’s Dune, noting that while Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is his reality’s Kwisatz Haderach, Final Reckoning “has none of the novel’s scepticism towards saviours and messiahs”.

I disagree. Beneath the surface, there’s a strongly self-critical subtext that questions the messianic myth of radical moral effectiveness that lies at the heart of the franchise.

The clearest example of this is the retrospective framing of the “Rabbit’s Foot” from Mission: Impossible III as a precursor to the AI entity. As his rival Gabriel (Esai Morales) gleefully tells him, this means that Hunt’s earlier success, powered by his usual conviction of moral heroism, unwittingly helped create the very threat he’s now trying to save the world from.

This in turn suggests that regardless of whether he finally beats the entity, true success may be no more than a chance outcome, in a world that is simply too complex for it to be possible to predict the second-order consequences of one’s actions.

This reading is bolstered by the fact that Ethan’s whole strategy in the film derives from an intense virtual mindmeld with the AI, including a visceral experience of potential nuclear annihilation (a highly creative riff on the iconic dream sequence in James Cameron’s 1991 classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day).

Crucially this technological merging of minds is essentially a unidirectional message from the entity, leaving us with the question of whether Ethan’s whole strategy of solitary heroism in fact plays into the Entity’s hands.

So while Hunt does appear to emerge victorious at the end of the film, there’s a strong suggestion that this is a pyrrhic victory.

By drawing together the previous films in the sequence in a final reckoning, we suddenly see a clear pattern whereby crisis routinely follows crisis - so that the only way to end the sequence of impossible missions is to recognise this very sequence as a symptom of something deeper, something that includes the methods and worldview of Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force (the abbreviation for which - IMF - also stands for the International Monetary Fund, a similarly ambitious organisation at the heart of the global capitalist system, that could also be seen as partly responsible for the catastrophes it tries to prevent).

This summer’s feel-good (or feel-bad) blockbuster therefore seems to point to the concept of ‘metacrisis’, a deep cultural crisis or root cause underlying multiple civilizational risks, developed by Daniel Schmachtenberger, Rufus Pollock and others - which would make it a film-making feat as implausible as Tom Cruise’s stunts.